Letting Go of the Past

 

Some people are angry and bitter about what happened in the past. Bad things happened to them, which weren't their fault. They hold their anger like a burning coal, ready to chuck it at someone…

Look at what happened to me…

Life's so unfair…

How could anyone make a go of life after such an experience…?

How could I ever hope to be happy after treatment like that…?

But it is they who are getting burnt.

 

Some people are full of regret about the past. Their heads are full of a constant stream of 'if onlys'…

If only I had applied for that job…

If only I had taken that course…

If only I had listened to my dad…

If only I had the guts to ask him to marry me…

 

Nostalgia can hold you back as much as regret or bitterness

Some people, in contrast, long for the past to come back. Lost in nostalgia for joys and satisfactions which they once had, they can hardly spare a moment for dealing with the demands of the present, or plan for the future, because their energy is spent on yearning for what has already gone…

I was happy in those days…

Back then I was really successful…

When I lived in Xville, I had everything I wanted…

now it's all gone…

 

Why does the past have such a grip on us?

Memory is a 'mixed blessing'. A store of good memories is a wonderful thing to be able to draw upon. The pleasures of the past can bring you much satisfaction in the present. Even bad memories have their uses, because we can learn from them, and so improve our futures.

But when our memories have strong emotional associations, they need to be carefully handled if they are not to wreck our present and future lives.

The human brain has evolved to be particularly responsive to the emotional aspects of our experience. If something arouses our emotions, whether positive or negative, much stronger memory traces of that experience are stored than for more 'neutral' experiences. We are programmed, as it were, to remember the 'high drama', rather than let it go.

 

Why holding on seems better than letting go

It's easy to understand why this is so. A highly positive experience will be stored to encourage us to seek out more similar experiences. A highly negative experience will be stored so that we will take great care to avoid such experiences in future.

'Letting go' can feel so very hard to do

Getting stuck in the past on the personal, individual scale, can keep us focussed on what is behind us to the detriment of what is in front of us. Even when we recognise that fixating on the past is not helping us and we should let it go, our feelings are so strong that we find this almost impossible.

When you let go of the past, your future opens up!

Overwhelming as they may seem, these feelings are not as inflexible as you might think. The intensity of our reactions to the remembered 'high drama' of our lives can be 'turned down'. This is not just a matter of waiting for sufficient time to pass - you can lose a lot of your life that way! When you know what to do, you can actively and significantly reduce the emotional impact of past events, and really let them go.

Hypnotherapy will help you finally let it go!

The key to this emotional freedom, allowing you to say goodbye to the past, let it go, and move on with your life, is using the very same mechanism which set up the association in the first place - the combined forces of imagination and emotion. But this time, instead of being at the mercy of events, you are in control, proactively choosing the association that will best serve your purpose in finding freedom to engage with the future.

Hypnotherapy is the easiest and most effective way to access and modify the unconscious processes by which we assign significance to events. That’s why it’s the ideal technique to help you to let go.

While in a deeply relaxed, hypnotic state you'll find that you can comfortably and easily take any past experience or memory whose emotional grip on you has been holding you back in life and completely change how you feel about it. You'll be able to really let the past go and turn to your future.

 

It’s that simple!